Denver Tegra K1 64-bit in production soon

Nvidia released its Q1 earnings back on Tuesday, after it accidentally sent the numbers to about 100 individuals. Since the company didn’t want to get in trouble with regulators, it released some preliminary data the same day, but it chose to save the financial Q1 2015 conference call for Thursday.

As a part of this announcement CEO of Nvidia Jen-Hsun Huang was asked about the Tegra K1’s ability to fight the 64-bit market and Huang gave quite a straightforward answer. He reminded Hans Mosesmann from Raymond James that there will be 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Tegra K1. This is nothing new, but Jen-Hsun said that the company is "expecting it to be in production long before the end of the year."

Tegra K1 32-bit and 64-bit have the same footprint and we are not sure if this statement still means we will see 64-bit Denver architecture shipping inside actual designs this year. Tegra K1 based on Denver was demonstrated back in January and Nvidia already said that is should be ready later this year. Despite the fact that Tegra K1 Logan 32-bit design has been shipping for a while, we still have to see some tablets based on it and maybe even some phones, too.

"As we go into the second half, we’ll see some pretty exciting products coming out with Tegra K1," said Jen-Hsun Huang.

However, he was not specific and it is not clear whether we can expect the 32-bit version, 64-bit version or of both of them. The 32-bit version of the chip is coming first and it is already shipping in the Jetson TK1 developer kit, but our sources are telling us that we might expect to see some tablets based on Tegra TK1 around Google I/O time. The new Shield is also due to happen rather soon, and as Nvidia totally controls and develops Shield and Tegra Note, you can imagine that these two products should get the Tegra K1 treatment fast.

Having a Kepler GPU inside will significantly speed up the gaming on these devices, but the main obstacle remains the lack of the killer eye candy games that can help the Tegra gaming push. The lack of high-volume design wins remains a concern, too.